The Problem With Leaving Twitter

June 25th, 2008 Comments

twitter There are many posts going around about Twitter today. All of them are great reads that I recommend. In one post, Steven Hodson of Winextra and Mashable (congrats Steven!) pointed out how similar Twitter can be to Windows and how we just don’t want to live without either one. He’s absolutely right. However, just like users are switching to Macs, there’s plenty of alternatives to Twitter. Some people are already heading to Plurk. There are some complications to discuss first. Quitting Twitter is about as hard as quitting smoking for a variety of reasons. Here are mine.
     

Community & Brand

community With nearly 900 followers now, I don’t seeing that same community number somewhere else. Not that I don’t have faith in myself. It’s just that I’ve already established myself on Twitter and that took months and a ton of work. I’m recommended by my followers and I’m continuously interacting and building on these connections. I’d hate to severe those connections and no matter how I try to do it, it would be a very abrupt severance.

In turn, this could actually do some damage to my brand. There is no alternative with the same community activity as Twitter to help recover from any of that damage either. I could lose potentially valuable connections switching to another service. I could also put a strain on some of the connections I’ve already made. There are quite a few people that I only talk to on Twitter. I don’t have the time to email them and see what’s going on and they most likely won’t have much time to respond. It wouldn’t be the same anyway.

The way that Twitter helps you to establish and grow your brand and your own community is absolutely amazing. These are the biggest reasons some people are even on Twitter. No other service compares and I really don’t see anyone who isn’t of the elite establishing the same numbers, brand growth, and value somewhere else.
    

Time and Energy

calendar I don’t know how long I’ve been on Twitter. It’s been a while though and I’ve put a lot of time and energy into everything I’ve done on Twitter. I worked hard at tweeting and I feel I’ve damn near mastered Twitter.

Think of it like this: when you get out of one relationship that you’ve put so much time and effort into, do you really feel like going out there, just to find a replacement to try to rebuild what you had with someone else?

No, you don’t. In your mind, you know you can’t either. It would be too tiresome. It would seem so tedious. It’s such a long and rigorous process that we don’t even realize how hard it is until all of it is about to go out the window. I personally don’t want to go through it again just to replace Twitter. I want to do it because I want to do it. When it’s forced and you’re really not ready, you won’t get much out of it. Plus, you’ll be tempted to give up for no good reason.
    

It’s About the Community

blog It’s amazing to me how so much is dependent upon the Twitter community. Can you see the power that this community has? It’s the same with Windows to be honest. It’s still in demand because of the community. No matter how much we hate the Twitter system, we love the Twitter community. That’s what makes us put up with Twitter’s bullshit. We know just how hard it would be to find what we’ve found on Twitter. We’ve been looking for it for so long and whether or not it was there before, the community was never there the way it is today on Twitter.

This is why I can’t leave Twitter…not now anyway and hopefully not ever.

Posted in Tech Opinion, Twitter | Tags: , ,
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  • Its a case of the getting too attached to your "home" but sometimes, you gotta get out of your comfort zone because the grass could be greener over the other side of the hill
  • I agree with you, if you're already satisfied with your current home, why transfer, it's a risk and you might not know it's not that good.
  • You should better stay on twitter. Twitter is much more active and better than plurks service. Since you have established a community in twitter, continue it until you reach the top. You are not yet the top user so better continue on twitter.
  • Nishland
    There will always be newer, bigger, better products/services out there. Advantages/Disadvantages to everything we use. That is the simple nature of competition. If we are making enough noise about Twitter or any of these other mediums, I am sure the developers are taking notice and working to improve (at least we can hope). Not like I am a twitter advocate or anything. If we continually abandon just to hit on the next 'new' thing, then what we will ever gain?
    I may not have a lot of followers on Twitter....neither have I promoted my brand. But I agree with you Corvida. Leaving would be bittersweet...
  • The unreliability of twitter got too much for me on June 27th , I've tried jaiku, friendfeed, pownce and plurk but ended up setting up my own microblog at http://microblog.weloveit.info/ using Wordpress with the Prologue theme.

    I find it better and am actually posting more , its also more personal and I don't worry so much about creating noise for the people who follow me.

    I've found that by reading peoples twitter feeds in an aggregator I can get a more coherent picture more quickly.

    The best part about twitter was the Instant Messaging interface and the 'track' facility , both of which are currently offline.

    The future should be more distributed not reliant on a single service provider.
  • I am amazed at the number of times the word "faith" is used in reference to Twitter. Is this a new religion :-) As we all know, faith is irrational and subjective by definition. When all is said and done, Plurk is much better for one2one, human2human conversation than Twitter.

    Well, I still use both Plurk and Twitter but I feel I'm getting closer and closer to Plurk - plus the "horizontal timeline" is real cool once you get used to it!
  • I think what will eventually happen if Twitter doesn't become more reliable is that it will become a place where people will ocassionally pop-in to say howdy and send some DMs and that will be all. Sad, but true.
  • While I agree that Twitter's community is very important, I wonder if it's people's laziness to move to another service that's keeping people in Twitter in the first place.

    I started a Plurk account and within a week I had 1/3 of my 300+ followers there, with more every day.

    Granted, Plurk is not Twitter, but it does keep the noise level down a bit.

    And really, if people care enough about you, they'll follow you wherever you go. The ones that don't, well, are they true followers or just people padding their own follow list? If you go to Twitter Karma, how many of people's followers have actually posted something in the last week or month?

    FriendFeed is starting to grow on me also. Not only is it like Plurk where it keeps the noise level down (albeit in a different manner), it's a great way to find new people.

    To be honest, I think Twitter as a service not only needs to become stable, but needs new features built in as well, with the stability issues, that might not happen for a while. We're already down to 20 req./hour and we even hit 10 a week or so ago. It's hard to keep up with things when 8 minutes is already too late.
  • Yup, there's a certain pliant intimacy to Twitter that's hard to beat.

    It is, mostly, a great community too (so far). A real democratizer, which is maybe why it's so appealing.
  • Like most I experimented with Jaiku, Pownce, Plurk, BrightKite etc and each time I returned to Twitter, because of the community.
    I have strayed to FriendFeed and stayed there, I am involved in a quite different community there. I use Twhirl with both Twitter & FF windows open, if Twitter is no responding, I wil concentrate of FF.
    I do not agree with the Windows analogy, I use Windows at work, Mac OsX on my laptop and Ubuntu on my home desktop. I can live without any one Os and have easily (even my Mac) for any length of time.
    The bar analogy is better.
    If twitter loses the community I will be out of there.
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